under the eye of a storm
by Mia-Zeklos
Summary: "When Jace had thought of the Institute while on the Morning Star, his memories of it were memories of home. It was easy, he'd thought later and not without a little cynicism, to think of it as a safe haven while his father starved and tortured him in his cell but things were significantly less perfect once he got back."


**Notes: Written by a prompt on tumblr.**

When Jace had thought of the Institute while on the Morning Star, his memories of it were memories of home. It was easy, he'd thought later and not without a little cynicism, to think of it as a safe haven while his father starved and tortured him in his cell but things were significantly less perfect once he got back.

At first, it had been one interrogation after another, paired with just enough food and runes to keep him alive and conscious. He hadn't been allowed to see his family or Clary or anyone who wasn't part of Victor Aldertree's carefully picked team of people who had never seen him before. They escorted him from the interrogation room to his bedroom and back again until he could barely keep track of day and night and until paranoia had seeped all the way inside his bones and he'd told them everything they asked of him.

Then they let him go.

Later, Jace would think that it was a carefully calculated move on the Clave's part to paint him as a traitor in the eyes of everyone in the Institute, drive him to the very edge and then tell him that he was free to go. It produced exactly the effect they'd likely been going for and accidentally - or not - exactly what Jace hadn't expected.

Robert had welcomed him back with open arms, but Maryse wouldn't meet his eyes and no one wanted to tell him why. Clary had been more than understanding - from what Jace had gathered, the mundane understanding of recovery was vastly different from the one in his world. Isabelle barely let him out of her sight. Alec...

Alec.

He was more affectionate than Jace remembered him being, but at the same time, he felt miles away. Whatever it was that Valentine had done to their bond was still there, blocking their bond and even if Jace desperately tried to reach through, there was no one on the other end. He hadn't mentioned it yet, afraid that it was one-sided. He had no idea how Alec would react if that was the case. Their bond had been frail when he'd left, but it had never been absent before and admitting that this was what it felt like now would make him seem even more damaged than he already did. He had enough time on his hands to figure it out - even when he wasn't under suspicion anymore, Jace still wasn't authorised to go on missions and that meant wandering around the Institute to his heart's content. He could handle it on his own and in the meantime, he could keep quiet about it. It wasn't the only bond he had to fix, after all.

He was aware that the Clave was intentionally keeping him in the dark about everything, but that didn't mean he received no information about the war and about the Institute in general. Isabelle, Clary and Alec were still allowed on Clave meetings and every piece of news felt too precious for him to forget until the current events started falling into place, one after another. The Lightwoods were still trying to get the Institute back, Maryse had given up whatever power they'd had left willingly and no one could quite forgive her for it yet, and Alec was doing his best to do as much as possible as well as possible so that he could get back in everyone's good books. No one had admitted to it, but the uncomfortable silence was enough to hint that he'd lost at least half of the people who'd still supported him after the wedding because he'd been too insistent about bringing Jace home. Jace felt grateful but also guilty - there was no one who knew better than him how much Alec's reputation meant to him and knowing that he'd sacrificed whatever was left of it for his sake was one more thing to weigh on his conscience; one more gap in every conversation that he didn't know how to fill.

In the whirlwind of it all, it had slipped from Jace's mind that if Alec had been downgraded from Head of the Institute, the amount of missions he went to had been upped. The realisation only caught up with him when Alec disappeared after breakfast and showed up hours later, dragged through the main entrance by a Shadowhunter Jace didn't recognise.

"It was a trap," the man was saying by the time Jace managed to make his way through the crowd they'd attracted. "There was a little girl calling for help and she-"

"She was a demon, yes," Maryse snapped. "You should have thought of that." If Jace didn't know her so well, he'd have thought that the criticism was intended for the newcomer, but her eyes were fixed on her son instead. Not criticism, not quite; just angry confusion that Jace found himself sharing. It wasn't like Alec to fall into something so simple if he was focused on what he was doing. And he always was, unless.

Unless the bond was blocked on his end too. If that was what was distracting him, Jace could understand. He hadn't been out on official missions yet, but he felt it during training too; a frustrating absence as if he was missing a limb that he hadn't even noticed until it was gone. At every turn, he expected to feel Alec's presence and it was never there and he couldn't imagine what that must have felt like in battle.

"I'll take care of him until the Silent Brothers arrive." His voice caused the same barely-there flinch in everyone present that he'd endured for almost a month now, but he soldiered on. "I'm his parabatai; my runes would work better than anyone else's. You have to let me take him to the hospital wing."

He knew that he was overstepping his rights. No one _had_ to let him do anything; not while they still acted as if they'd seen a rather unpleasant ghost every time he entered a room. But they most likely would anyway. Even if they'd both lost their hard-earned respect recently, Shadowhunters still respected the parabatai bond enough to let him have what he wanted and, after a brisk nod from Maryse, Jace took over.

Alec didn't stir until Jace had left him in one of the empty beds and that was the only indication Jace needed to just how bad things were. He hoped that it wouldn't look quite as bad by the time Isabelle arrived and he pushed his parabatai's shirt up, fingers freezing once his eyes found their parabatai rune.

The blocking rune was a startling black against Alec's skin, intertwining with the lines of the rune underneath, but it was clear that it hadn't been drawn by his hand. And why would it be? If Alec had really thrown as much effort into tracking him down as Jace had heard, why would he try to numb their bond even further? Jace could barely imagine the kind of dark magic Valentine could have used to reach through Jace's rune and all the way to the other end of the bond and what he could have done to keep it invisible for Alec's eyes, but he didn't waste too much time on that, reaching for his stele instead so that he could undo it as soon as he could.

The first thing that came through was pain. Physical, burning pain that forced Jace's hand into the iratze he'd been planning to do before he'd got distracted, quickly replaced by relief. Not from the lack of pain – it was far too early for that – but from their bond suddenly taking its rightful place, hesitant but there nevertheless.

"You're here."

Alec's speech was slurred and Jace looked up to see him struggle to open his eyes. He squeezed his parabatai's hand briefly. "I've always been."

"No," Alec continued, clearing his throat. "No. It's. You're _here_."

 _Oh_. "Yes." The door opened somewhere behind him and Isabelle practically ran in, followed by Clary and the Silent Brothers. "Don't worry," he lowered his voice. "I'm not going anywhere."


End file.
